August Epp and Ona’s Love

August Epp and Ona’s Love is a longstanding attachment that persists through rejection, social stigma, and separation. Its clearest declaration comes as Ona Friesen leaves with the women: August Epp says he will always love her, and Agata Friesen confirms that Ona loves him too, while describing her love as extending to everyone. The relationship’s ending is therefore both intimate and unresolved: the text affirms mutual love, but does not establish a marriage or a shared future.

A Longstanding Attachment Under Pressure

August Epp tells Agata Friesen that he has long wanted to marry Ona Friesen and has asked for her hand many times over the years. Agata’s question about whether Ona always refused suggests a history of unsuccessful proposals, though the exchange does not supply Ona’s reasons for declining them. August’s persistence is not presented as a new impulse produced by the women’s departure; it is a feeling he has carried across years.

That attachment exists within a colony that judges Ona harshly. When her pregnancy becomes known, several women hurry to arrange a marriage between her and Julius Penner, the son of Ondrej Penner. Ona insists that Julius deserves better than a woman marked by Narfa and that marrying someone who is not a virgin would taint him with sin. The elders, meanwhile, treat her condition as proof that she cannot reason. These judgments narrow the social possibilities available to Ona, while August’s later declaration makes clear that his regard for her has endured beyond the colony’s condemnation. The evidence does not say that he intervenes in the proposed marriage or that he is to raise her unborn child, whom another family is expected to take in.

Confidence and Shared Moral Language

A private conversation near August Epp’s shed offers a quieter measure of their closeness. Ona Friesen calls his name while he is returning from the washhouse, and he registers the encounter as emotionally powerful. She then asks why he went to jail. He answers that he stole a horse. The exchange gives Ona the initiative: she asks for an explanation, and August answers plainly. Their conversation turns his past into something he can disclose to her rather than a subject he must conceal.

Their affinity also appears in a discussion about the younger boys of Molotschna Colony. August argues that boys aged thirteen and fourteen can be taught, and that direction, firm love, and patience can help them learn different ways of being men. As he recalls the educational principles of Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Ona silently mouths the words with him. She recognizes the moral language he is using, which is connected to her mother’s earlier teaching. The moment is not a proposal or a declaration of romance; it shows a meeting of values, in which Ona understands the source and meaning of August’s appeal to sympathy and love.

Love Named at the Moment of Departure

As the women prepare to descend from the loft and leave, Ona Friesen asks what will happen to August Epp. The narrator identifies this as the last thing he hears her say. Her question places him in the scene of departure even as she is leaving, a small but consequential sign that his fate matters to her.

August smiles, stammers, and waves. When Agata asks whether Ona always said no to his proposals, he does not give a direct answer. Instead, he calls to Ona and declares that he will always love her. He hears her laugh, but can no longer see her as she goes. Agata then tells him that Ona loves him too, adding that she loves everyone. The confirmation resolves one uncertainty—the affection is mutual—without converting it into a promise of marriage. Agata’s addition also places their personal bond within Ona’s wider capacity for care, rather than making romantic love the only measure of what she feels.

A Later Gesture of Hope

In a later exchange, Ona Friesen takes August Epp’s hand and guides him toward the sunlight. She places his hand on her pregnant belly and tells him that she has prayed he will find God’s grace. She describes him as a physical reminder of goodness, hope, and life after violence. Her reassurance is bound to August’s family history: she is referring to his mother and to Peters, his biological father, rather than to the man who raised him and later disappeared.

August understands his resemblance to Peters as the reason he and his mother were sent away from the colony. He associates that resemblance with shame, violence, unacknowledged sin, and the failure of the Mennonite experiment. Ona’s response does not erase that history; it offers another meaning for the same inheritance. In her account, August can stand as a reminder of goodness and of life beyond violence. The contact of her hand and the prayer she speaks make love an act of reassurance as well as a declared feeling. Yet the scene does not settle their practical future. What it establishes is the continuing significance of their bond: even amid departure, pregnancy, and the weight of family history, Ona reaches for August and affirms the possibility of hope.